[Haskell] Re: ST/STRef vs. IO/IORef

[Till Mossakowski]

Remi Turk wrote:
> Ah, I think I understand what we're disagreeing about exactly
> now. We're understanding "primitive" to mean different things :)
> 
> You're seeing runST, newSTRef, writeSTRef etc as primitives, is
> that correct? I see them as the public interface to something
> which is implemented in something else. 

The advantage of seeing runST, newSTRef, writeSTRef etc as primitives
is that there is a denotational semantics for them (see Laucnbury/
Peyton Jones: "State in Haskell"), which coincides with the operational
semantics. This is not the case for unsafePerformIO. unsafePerformIO
is a purely operational primitive, although some uses of unsafePerformIO
can a posteriori (and usually with a lot of handwaving) shown to
behave in a good (denotational) way. The ghc file you cite should be 
regarded as operational detail, not as a language definition of
runST, newSTRef, and writeSTRef.

> Remi "We're probably agreeing 99.9% anyway" Turk

Yes, of course.

Till


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Till Mossakowski               Phone +49-421-218-4683
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